Janus (9 page)

“She didn’t turn him in,” he went on. “Maybe she couldn’t describe him, maybe they weren’t interested. But he was shit scared for a month. And still he couldn’t stop. Knew he’d kill one of them sooner or later. And if they didn’t get him before, they would then, and he’d be inside for a long time. And even that wouldn’t have made him stop. But when it reached the point where he found he was looking at his own kids . . .

“Then, finally, he started looking for ways out. In the end, he turned himself in for treatment. They stirred his brains about, and made him do community work at a crisis centre, and finally let him loose in the world. But how could he go back to his old job and his friends after that? Finally, he decided there was only one place to go—out. So he applied for here.

“Of course, when he got here, all that had gone. He thought he’d just been one of those who got sick of the wages and the stinking air at rush hour and the cops clearing everyone off the streets at midnight every Friday in summer. The treatment at the clinic wasn’t much help. After a couple of months he gave up on it and quit going. But he lucked out. The memories came back. And he decided, this time he’d do it right, all the way. And that’s what he’s done. Not one slip as long as he’s been here, not even been tempted, as far as I know.”

“That’s interesting,” Grebbel said carefully. “I’d like to think about what you said. Maybe we can talk about it some more.”

Menzies nodded. “That’s why I told you. There’s no need to shout this right across the valley, by the way.”

Grebbel wondered whether to challenge the man and ask him if he had been talking about himself or using a piece of fiction as some kind of bait. Then he decided he really did need to think about Menzies’ story.

He spent the afternoon moving gravel from the river bank to the growing dam. After half an hour he began to feel comfortable with the vehicle.

Thinking of what Menzies had said, he remembered the woman, Elinda, in the cafeteria late that morning. He was drawn by an intensity in her look, and a vulnerability. And their potentially shared hidden pasts. She was interested too, also in spite of herself, he could tell. He was reluctant to admit that his emotions were so labile, but he would not hide from himself.

Grebbel watched the smoky spears of sunlight edge along the far valley wall as he worked. He tried to picture Menzies as the actor in the story he had told, a man with two lives, the conventional family role, and the secret appetites. The mask and the true face beneath. He had been forced to choose. But what convulsions came, when he chose the mask and denied the flesh?

At the end of the shift, he ate quickly in the cafeteria without getting into any long conversations, then walked beside the river.

When he judged it was the equivalent of early evening, he turned towards the path up the valley side, to see if Elinda would keep their appointment.

She was late. Grebbel had been pacing back and forth long enough to see the first moon appear like a pale dead leaf above the mountains. He watched a large membranous creature drift towards the west like a squarish kite. The local equivalent of a vulture, he thought, until it vanished above a mountain of cumulus.

He remembered the icy water glittering around their feet, as though the stones they stood on were flowing uphill. Perhaps he had misread her, and she wouldn’t come. Perhaps something had happened with the friend she was looking for. . . . How close a friend?

Perhaps all his judgements were empty guesswork, and their basis in experience had been stripped away when he came through the Knot.

When Elinda appeared, she walked slowly, as though she were having to think about each step. Grebbel went to meet her, and she halted abruptly, her face half-turned from him, her eyes in shadow.

“You see,” she said, in a thin remote voice, “I remembered. We both remembered to come and remember. What do you think we should remember this time? How about something really important, like the number of the bus you took to school, or what we were doing the day they liberated the mental wards in Chile. It’s the fault of the moons, you see. They both pull up tides in our brains, and our thoughts keep getting pulled apart. I shouldn’t be here otherwise. You can feel the tides if you want. You turn to the moons and you feel the tides in your eyes.”

She lifted her face until the red sunlight spilled across it, and he saw that she was crying quietly, and must have been crying all the time she talked.

“What’s happened?”

“They tried to give me a sedative, but I wouldn’t. I can feel the tides now, and I have to keep my head above water or I’ll go down in the mud. Face in the mud. Mud in Barbara’s hair, and dead leaves—her teeth snapped and she screamed, but then she was like stone again. They say she’ll be all right, and they know, don’t they? But they didn’t want to upset me any more, that’s why they took me away from her and tried to give me a sedative. So perhaps they’re not telling the truth. We took her to the clinic this afternoon, but she must have been out there all along. Ever since I woke up yesterday.”

“Your—roommate? What’s wrong with her?”

She shook her head and replied with more animation in her voice. “I don’t know. I don’t know. They’ve put her in the ward, sedated, but they won’t tell me what’s wrong. She didn’t know me. I’d left her lying out there in the mud and the wind. I could have found her that morning if I’d bothered to look, but now she doesn’t know me.”

Grebbel’s breath caught. He had a sudden impression of something filthy and hoarse-voiced that writhed and mewled—something that drooled and vomited and clawed at its own flesh, and stared about with flickering eyes that still seemed haunted by the memory of being human.

“I stayed at the clinic all afternoon,” Elinda said. “Then I came here.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the matter? Did the moons upset you too?”

“I don’t know,” Grebbel muttered. “A surprise just now, maybe. Something I remembered? I don’t know. She wasn’t physically hurt, your friend?”

“No broken bones, stab wounds, no signs of poisoning, no marks or bruises she couldn’t have got by falling over a rock.”

“What could have happened, then?”

“No one wants to guess. But now I’m wondering about the leaflet I saw yesterday—about whether some people here had come out of mental wards. I’ve no reason to think that about her, have I? But I can’t help asking myself—I mean they’d have a thirty percent chance of losing their pasts too, wouldn’t they?”

“So you think—Barbara—could have been unbalanced, and you didn’t know it?”

“She couldn’t remember what she had been, any more than I could. But she didn’t care, she always said. She wanted to know what she was now. She was always looking for hidden meanings in what you said, writing down her dreams, and things like that. It was a game to her, fun. She didn’t tell me what she found, if it was anything. Of course I never thought she was insane. It wouldn’t make any sense, would it, letting her live with me without warning me? Well, I’d have spat in your face if you’d tried to tell me that, yesterday. But I didn’t know this could happen.” She hesitated, whispered. “I didn’t know I’d start suspecting her.”

He looked at her as she shook her head and shivered.

“This isn’t doing any good,” he said. “And we’re getting cold. Let’s go back.”

“You came here for nothing.”

“Not for nothing. Just not what we hoped.”

They began to walk back.

“Listen to the wind,” she said. “It’s almost died, but it sounds just like the falls by the dam. When I listen to them now, it always seems there are voices just underneath, trying to reach me. She worked with things like that, and I wouldn’t then, I never used to listen. . . .”

“It’s not a good time to be alone,” he said, and put his arm around her. She was shivering minutely and constantly.

She seemed to relax, then stiffened away from him. “No, don’t. I keep thinking of Barbara there in the clinic. I don’t know what I’m feeling any more.”

“You’ve had a bad shock, that’s all. Are you going back to the clinic now?”

They passed from sunlight to shade and back before she answered. “No. They were going to keep her sedated overnight while they treated her for exposure. There wouldn’t be any point in going back now. Tomorrow, I’ll get her things from her desk in the clinic, but right now I’d better go home. There are things I have to face.”

“You feel you should have found her earlier and you want to torture yourself with guilt.”

“I have to think it out for myself. Lots of things. Tomorrow, perhaps I’ll be sane, and we can play at remembering again.”

Elinda closed the front door behind her and stood in the curtained living room while the shadows closed around her like dark water. She shivered, but it would be worse in daylight, the emptiness. She made her way to the kitchen. The wooden chair scraped in the silence. She winced and sat down with her elbows on the table.

It was there where she had left it, next to the pepper grinder, the silvery box she had found in Barbara’s pocket. An audio recorder. She wasn’t sure why she had taken it and said nothing to Charley, but it had felt urgent at the time to have something of Barbara’s that no one else could handle or take away.

And like too much else it had turned out to be a cheat. The thing worked: it would produce a window of quivering black bars showing how much noise was in each of six frequency bands; it would display a set of numbers identifying the very second when each burst of sound had been recorded. But of Barbara herself . . .

In the clinic she had seemed calmer; though she muttered to herself, she seemed unaware of Elinda or anything around her. The sounds she made, if they really were words, were almost meaningless: “Do. What remember. Do. Do.”

Elinda thumbed the replay button again. And again came the empty hissing, and the few muttered syllables, hardly even recognisable as her voice, “Testing, testing . . .” Was that to be the last coherent thought to come from her lips?

Elinda’s eyes closed. She let her head sink onto her forearms. Just for a moment, rest.

Darkness flowed past her, through her. She twisted in the current and was standing on stone at the edge of the water. Her shadows forked behind her, and the moon in the water drew her eyes. It blurred and warped and began to grow. The moon rose towards her, to meet her at the boundary of air and water. It changed. Its mouth gaped and its empty eyes stared.

She was bolt upright, pushing down on the table top as though she had to hold it in its place. She choked. “Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. What was that?” She lurched to the window and clawed back the blind.

The light beat at her. She made herself stare at the mountains and the lurid sky until the ache in her eyes had driven some of the nightmare away. She smiled grimly. “Yeah. Gonna be a long night.

“Shit. Oh, shit. Barb, what’s happened to you? Are you taking me with you, wherever you’ve gone?”

She went into the living room, then into all the rooms, snapping on lights. At Barbara’s study she stopped and looked in, her hands on either side of the doorframe. It was unusual to find the door ajar. Barbara had been—was,
was
—meticulous about things like that. Elinda pushed the door fully open and went in.

There was a small, stiff-backed brown notebook on the table. It was closed, and she did not feel ready to violate its secrecy. She could find no signs of whatever Barbara had been going through. The room was meticulously tidy.

Except for the waste bin, an empty paint can covered in local tree bark. It was full to overflowing with sheets of paper, more than Elinda could remember seeing in one place. She plucked at an exposed corner. A wad of paper shifted and a couple of sheets fell to the floor. They were data sheets from the lab where Barbara worked, crumpled so that Elinda could see Barbara’s quaint, backward-slanted copperplate in green ink covering their backs. Some of the phrases seemed familiar. She picked up one of the sheets and, smoothing it on the table, sat down to read it.

After a few moments she picked another sheet off the floor and compared it with the first. Then she examined the others. There were lists of names, and comments she could not understand on some of the sheets, but three were clear enough. They were a rough draft of the leaflet that had appeared two mornings earlier.